Just had a not-surprise...

[Anonymouse]

At a Lidl checkpoint I noticed a terminal...running what appears to be a DOS program on a network. So much for DOS being dead.

Mind you, as a former programmer I know there are still billions of lines of COBOL in use today - and the world's stock markets, businesses and others are dependent upon those programs, which cannot be shut down without causing a software version of what 006 intended in GoldenEye!

Yes, the powers that be have wanted to update them with more modern programs for decades. Problems:

1) COBOL is no longer taught in schools. As COBOL programmers retire/quit/are fired/die, they are not being replaced any more.
2) The programs run 24/7, and replacing them would require either parallel systems to gradually take over, or a shutdown.
3) It would cost far, far more to replace them than it did to write and install them. It's been decades, remember.
4) The documentation for a lot of them has been lost, so no-one even knows what'll happen even if they can be replaced. In fact there are many for which no-one even knows or remembers how they work.
5) AI can't do it - or if it can, it'll still cost a fortune, it'll still take years - and the chances are good that IT WON'T BLOODY WORK!

Made my day! Makes the point of my signature, doesn't it?

[tweetiepooh]

It should be possible to slowly replace things if the systems are modular enough so that specific function is replaced in non-COBOL piece by piece.
My main concern would be on the data stores, programmes are easy to change but the data store is often less so. If you can mirror out the data store, ideally two way then the new platform can work with the new datastore with transactions mirrored to the old and visa-versa. The problem in some areas is latency and even millisecond delays can cost plenty but surely if everyone is equally affected????
It's not trivial even so and you know full well that things never work out as planned, especially as it gets bigger and you have multiple layers of project managers all messing things up.

Originally Posted by Anonymouse

1) COBOL is no longer taught in schools. As COBOL programmers retire/quit/are fired/die, they are not being replaced any more.

COBOL Programmer here, not dead yet.

Its been a quite a few years since I did any though.